July 15, 2014

July 15, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

This journal entry is written with a different letter type “Constantia” and this writer was reminded of what can happen when his writings are under discriminative control of the font he chooses to write with. The stream of writings that this writer has produced in recent times has somewhat subsided and this writer is again trying to find a more inspiring letter type. He was previously writing with letter type “Forte” and he enjoyed that a lot, but the last time he wrote with it, he felt kind of worn out. Also, he has written an announcement for his next seminar in the “Castellar” letter type. It helped and it produced a good announcement, but he doesn’t want to continue to write with it anymore. Apparently, he can only be inspired by the font for so long before his writing becomes more of the same. At this moment, it feels like a relief to be writing with the “Constantia” font again. It is as if some regularity has returned and this writer wants to see what happens when he carries on with that.

It is kind of nice, after having experimented with different fonts, to be back with this one which seems to give a certain calm and stability. The absence of emotional involvement makes it a pleasant experience to write with “Constantia” and to read it. This reminds this writer about speaking and listening. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), speakers can listen to themselves while they speak and they enjoy what they hear. This is different from the saying that someone ‘likes to hear himself talk’. What is meant by that is usually that the person talks on and on, but is not really listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. If one doesn’t listen to one self, one can’t decide whether one likes what one hears. Moreover, if you don’t listen to yourself, because others are made to listen to you, you may imagine that you sound all right, but this is very different when you are made to listen to yourself. When others stop you from talking, because they don’t like what they hear, then you suddenly don’t like what you hear either. You really don’t like to hear that they don’t like to listen to you!!!

The fact that others don’t like to listen to us often unfortunately prevents us from listening to ourselves. When others don’t want to hear what we want to say, our attention tends to go to them, instead of to ourselves. Others respond to us, but we when they express that they don’t want to listen to us, we try whatever we can to make them listen to us. As long as we can get away with this, as long as we can surround ourselves with enablers, we will continue to talk at others, but not with them. This is how Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) works. 

In NVB the speaker doesn’t care about the listener and thus neglects the listener. In NVB all the attention goes continuously to the speaker. If any attention goes to the listener at all, it is only to make sure that the listener keeps on doing exactly as he or she is told by the speaker. In NVB we glorify and placate the coercive speaker and we tell him or her that he or she sounds great when in reality he or she sounds terrible. The listener who fulfills this mandatory energy-draining task is a 'good' listener because he or she reinforces NVB.  

SVB is a listener’s perspective on our spoken communication. The listener is afraid to tell the speaker that he or she sounds horrible, because he or she knows that if he or she would do that, all hell breaks loose. Not enabling the speaker would immediately be punished. In NVB, since the listener is not really a listener at all and the speaker is not really a speaker either, but the spell of make-belief can only be broken by the listener. 

Speakers continue to speak the way they speak regardless of what the listeners think or feel. Speakers continue to use violence to emphasize their words. NVB speakers pay lip-service to their listeners, but make sure they say what listeners ‘want’ to hear. What anyone is forced to hear is based on fear. The listener is not listening although he or she keeps buying into fear. The speaker threatens the listener and then supposedly protects the listener from this threat by doing the talking for him or for her. What happens is that the speaker prevents the listener from speaking. The listener has forgotten that he or she can actually speak. The listener may occasionally speak, but that way of speaking is not the speech which makes the speaker listen. Morever, when listeners to NVB speakers speak, most likely, they don’t listen to themselves either. In NVB, neither the speaker nor the listener listens. When the listener really listens, his or her own private speech becomes one with the public speech of the speaker.  That is SVB!

In NVB the private speech of the listener contradicts the public speech of the speaker. In NVB there is a constant tension between private speech and public speech. In NVB private speech is excluded from public speech. In SVB, the speaker’s private speech is similar to the listener’s private speech and doesn’t interfere with the speaker's public speech. In SVB private and public speech are joined. In NVB private speech and public speech are disconnected. 

A speaker’s public speech may unknowingly or unconsciously be perceived by the listener as disturbing by his or her private speech or the listener's private speech may also knowingly and consciously be perceived as distracting from the public speech of the speaker. The difference between a person’s private and public speech is a subject matter which remains difficult to talk about as long as the attention of the communicators, both the speakers and the listeners, is only on the speaker. In NVB, the attention is always on the speaker and the topic of the conversation is what the speaker says. In SVB, by contrast, the listener determines the topic of the conversation. Moreover, the attention focuses on whether the listener understands the speaker. This sets the stage for a different kind of interaction than one in which the speaker is presumably more important than the listener. In SVB, the speaker is important because he or she is understood by the listener. In NVB, speakers demand the attention from the listeners. 

In SVB, speakers give attention to the listeners due to how they speak. In NVB, speakers hold, hijack and drain the attention of the listeners. Because in SVB attention is given to the listener, the listener is given the opportunity to speak. Because in SVB the attention is given to the listener, the speaker will listen to the listener, who is stimulated by the speaker to speak in a SVB manner. Because NVB speakers dominate the attention of the listener, even when these listeners become speakers, they neither listen to themselves nor to others. The selfishness and dominance of the NVB speakers is characterized by their outward orientation, which affect the listener.  In NVB, the speech only goes in one direction: from the speaker to the listener.  In NVB speaker literally rams whatever he or she says down the listener's throat. In effect, whatever the listener would want to say is forced back by what the speaker is saying.

July 11, 2014

July 11, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

People may say that they don’t want to talk or they only want to talk if they can control the conversation, but that is not a reason to stop talking with them.  It needs to be pointed out that not talking or talking in which one communicator, the speaker, dominates the other, the listener, is NOT communication. This writer has found that the communication can only be continued by insisting on the fact that Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) this is NOT communication. That many people think that dominating each other is the way, means that we keep having NVB. 

Those who do most of the talking produce NVB, not Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). It couldn’t be any other way. SVB can only be attained and maintained in a deliberate manner, by those who know the contingency that makes it possible. The absence of SVB is a consequence of our lack of communication skills. This lack of skills sets the stage for how we talk. Sophisticated conversation cannot occur due to our blunt ways. The saying "if you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" comes to mind. The fact that people are trying to listen to each other didn't and couldn't produce SVB. To the contrary, most people keep trying to listen to NVB and are sold on it hook, line and sinker, over and over again. NVB is happening everywhere because it is reinforced. Most environments don't reinforce SVB. What this comes down to is that people simply don't know how to have it.

The distinction between SVB and NVB has never really been made. Attempts have been made to recognize our different ways of communicating, but none of these attempts have lead to a coherent theory which explains what is happening. Stated differently, no matter what we choose to believe, there has never been any real consistency in our way of communicating. One moment there was SVB and the next moment there was NVB, but nobody bothered, because we all bought into it.

The authority of those who sell well, who know how to play on our emotions, is based on the illusion of SVB, while in reality NVB keeps on going. However, we can’t have SVB until we stop selling ourselves. Although we keep trying to convince ourselves that we are really communicating, we are selling ourselves short. We even think that we want to be sold on what someone says and then buy into the message, but we don't realize that SVB, real interaction, can’t be bought. 

SVB doesn't depend on politics, religion, sexual orientation, economics, language, race or culture. Indeed, SVB includes and transcends these familiar categories. NVB, by contrast, gets us stuck to these categories. NVB perpetuates inequality.  SVB exposes NVB, which goes on in the name of human interaction.  The expression of negative emotions is problematic and is neither necessary nor useful. We all  think it is okay to keep burdening each other with negativity, but that must stop. 

July 10, 2014

July 10, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer hasn’t written anything lately from a first-person perspective. As a consequence, he has also not addressed the reader directly. He is no longer so eager to address the reader directly. The reader will find that this writer is taking him or her to a third-person perspective of how we speak. If what this writer is aiming to accomplish succeeds, the reader will obtain a new view on his or her own first-person perspective, due to this third-person perspective.  

There is a certain order in how we communicate. Although we may have many problems, there is always a lawfulness to our verbal behavior.  Functionally, our way of communicating as well as our problems can be explained. To take this view, we look at how the environment, such as other communicators, but also circumstances and things, affect the way in which we, as individuals, talk.  How we as individuals speak sets the stage for how others talk with us. To find out how we talk together, we must look at how we talk as individuals.  

Since verbal behavior is mediated by another person, the tendency is to go with our attention to how we impact others. What is missing from this picture is how we impact ourselves by the way in which we speak. By remaining busy with how we would like to affect others, we are never in the position to realize how our own way of talking is affecting us. We keep thinking that this effect is caused by others, but, and this is where things can get complicated, neither others, nor we ourselves are causing this. To tease this apart, we must begin to realize that our speech is never caused by us, individually, but by our environment.  Only once we have acknowledged that our individual way of talking is function of our environment can we realize that this as true for ourselves as for those with whom we communicate. When we want to change how others communicate, we make them responsible, but we ignore the fact that our speech is caused by the environment. 

To rephrase the aforementioned, when we try to change the way others speak, we lose track of the fact that we are their environment and that they are our environment. When this happens, we produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) because we threaten others or we feel threatened by them. The notion that we are not responsible for each other while we speak, that we are only responsible for ourselves, is why NVB continues. However, in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we are both responsible for each other as well as for ourselves. In NVB, by contrast, we are neither responsible for ourselves nor for each other. 

NVB continues because we keep thinking we are responsible for ourselves and  others, therefore, are responsible for themselves as well. This false belief can become clear when we treat SVB and NVB as two different languages which were learned under very different circumstances. During moments of SVB, we were feeling responsible for ourselves and for each other, but during moments of NVB, we were neither responsible for each other, nor for ourselves. Our lack of a scientific understanding regarding how we speak has perpetuated the notion that we are individually responsible for how we speak. Consequently, NVB is everywhere and SVB is only happening in an accidental and inconsistent manner. 

The way in which we individually speak affects others, but it also affects our selves. How we affect others is one thing, but how we affect ourselves is another. Often how we affect others is different from how we affect our selves. In NVB, there is no congruence between how we affect each other and how we affect ourselves. In SVB, we affect ourselves and each other in exactly the same way. This is not something to be believed, but something to be experienced. Once we have more of this experience, we realize that NVB is based on the dissociation from ourselves and from each other. During SVB, our way talking is bi-directional, the speaker becomes the listener and the listener can become the speaker, but in NVB, in uni-directional, my-way-or-the-highway speech, the speaker is alienated from the listener and both are alienated from each other, that is, from the environment.

July 9, 2014

July 9, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

In his current job as a case manager for those who have returned from jail and prison back to society, this writer is expected not to say anything about himself. He is teaching skills-based classes to help parolees make the transition and adjust and live a ‘normal’ life again. One challenging goal is to stimulate them to find employment, because this is significantly related to reducing their rate of recidivism. Many of these clients have been incarcerated for serious crimes and have spend many years in prison. Because of their histories they can be very manipulative. 

By working with this new population, this writer practices a skill, which is very beneficial to him. By not revealing anything personal, he discovers a way of talking and thinking which was not possible when he was speaking the way he was used to. In other words, the establishing operation of his speech makes him say, think, feel and, above all, notice, different things. Since he just started in this position, he experiences the novel effects of his new environment on his behavior. Moreover, as he was hired because of his skills and his emphasis on behaviorism, he is considered to already possess the necessary components to be successful in this job. The support he receives for working with this difficult population, while being cautious not to say anything that can be turned against him, is especially rewarding to him. 

It is a great relief for this writer not to talk about anything personal anymore.  It is fascinating to notice, how what was for many years his biggest weakness has now transformed and is still transforming, into his strength.  In his new job there is an orderliness and a structure which this writer appreciates. The predictability of his current situation is the total opposite from his previous job as a mental health worker in a group home for the mentally ill.  There, a rather chaotic work environment existed because of a lack of structure and leadership.

July 8, 2014

July 8, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

There is always something to write about and when whatever catches this writer’s attention is written about, this makes this writer feel good. It is simply a matter of paying attention to whatever asks his attention. The words, which are used to describe this process don’t need to be part of a big vocabulary, because the use of one’s words is now a function of the verbal exploration of one’s nonverbal experience. In this way, this writer has found that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) only occurs when there is a match between what one experiences non-verbally and what one says verbally.  When, by contrast, one’s words don’t clarify what one feels, when feelings are diminished instead of enhanced by what one says, then one will be producing Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).    

The discovery that there can be a match between what one says and how one says it is a behavioral cusp, which makes many other behaviors possible.  Like a musician, who is automatically reinforced by the music he or she is playing, one can feel reinforced by how one speaks. Such automatic reinforcement only becomes part of one’s behavioral repertoire if there was a situation, or rather, if there were many situations, in which this behavior was reinforced, by others. 

So, the musician, who was reinforced multiple times for the music that he or she was playing for others, can sit by him or herself and enjoy playing his or her instrument, because he or she knows that others would like it as much as he or she likes it him or herself. In the same way, a speaker can say things to him or herself, because it has been reinforced by others multiple times.  Even when the speaker only speaks with him or herself, the speaker experiences what and how he or she speaks as reinforcing, because he or she can predict that what and how he or she speaks will be reinforced. The musician hones his or her skills by practicing his or her instrument by him or herself and after such practice he or she gets together to first practice and then perform with the other musicians. 

Although a similar process is possible with spoken communication, nobody instructs us to diligently talk with ourselves by ourselves, nobody urges us to practice the way we speak. This is what this author wants the reader to do. This text can be used by the reader to read out loud, so that the reader can explore what it is like listen to him or herself while he or she speaks. When the reader reads these words, he or she can listen to the sound of his or her voice. Nothing else is needed. This allows the reader to experience the congruence between what he or she says and how he or she is saying it. Since the what, in the case of the musician, the music score, is provided and since these written words are given to the reader, who is invited by this writer to become a speaker, in the same way as the Mozart music score invites the musician to learn how to play his music, the reader can now focus his or her attention on how he or she sounds. Similarly to the music, which is read, rehearsed and performed by a musician, the reader doesn’t need to think about these words, which were composed so that he or she could hear him or herself. 

When people learn a language they are reinforced for using the right sounds as well as the right words. The ubiquity of NVB is a consequence of the fact that we are more reinforced for what we say than for how we say it. This text takes the reader into how he or she says what he or she says. Now the reader begins to reinforce him or herself and the reader experiences that automatic reinforcement builds on earlier circumstances in which self-listening was possible. It is impossible to learn a language without paying attention to how it sounds.  

Because we are fixated on what is said or written, we have become alienated from what happens when what is said is said and when what is written is read. This writer has written this text so that the reader, while reading, can loosen his or her fixation on words. The reader has a sound and the reader can speak with that sound, which is only produced when the reader hears him or herself.  When the reader experiences his or her voice as sounding good, he or she produces SVB.